The National Strategy Playbook is the concluding output of the 2024-25 Heywood Fellowship, which set out to learn and define what a contemporary practice of national strategy-making, fit for the challenges of the next twenty years, actually is. When faced with long-term challenges requiring complex, concerted responses from the state and society, how can democracies – with election cycles, multi-level governance, shifting mandates and changes in public mood – create the capabilities and conditions needed for successful national strategy? Learning from best practice from around the world, our own history, case studies from places around the United Kingdom and the private sector, and from interviews, roundtables, seminars and events with a range of practitioners, this talk will consider what we have learned about the practice of national strategy against our current backdrop, and discuss how we answered the challenge we set ourselves by asking, constantly: how would we actually do this?
Lucy Smith: Long-term strategy as practice: the National Strategy Playbook
- Date
- 25 March 2026
- Time
- 12:00-13:00 CET
About
Speaker
Lucy Smith
2024-25 Heywood Fellow, Blavatnik School of Government, and Director General, UK Civil Service
Lucy Smith is a Director General in the UK Civil Service. She recently concluded the Heywood Fellowship at the Blavatnik School of Government. The Fellowship focussed on long-term national strategy making in the United Kingdom and culminated in the publication of the National Strategy Playbook, an account of the capabilities, practices and methods required to develop successful strategy in a changing global and domestic context. The findings are available here: https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/fellowship/heywood-fellowship
Lucy’s career has been rooted in the leadership of strategy in government and expertise in governance and political systems. She was Director General for Strategy at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from 2020 to 2024. From 2012 to 2020, Lucy held senior roles at the Cabinet Office, first as Principal Private Secretary to the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg during the Coalition Government, and from 2015 onwards – both as Constitution Director and then Director General of UK Governance Group – as principal adviser in government on the constitution, devolution, intergovernmental relations, elections and the democratic process. Lucy spent the early part of her career in the Department for Education in a number of roles, including Director of Strategy from 2010-2012.